Old HP Color LaserJet only prints in gray

Tech Support
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Alright, so I may not be a Mac power user, but it seems I need some such powers to fix this: I have a nearly 20 years old HP Color LaserJet 4700 dn printer. It works great under Linux, creating color prints that would require a very expensive printer to match. I’m trying to get it working under OSX Sonoma 14.3.1 running on a Macbook Air M1. I have a newer M2 too, but I need to get it working on this one first.

Bonjour detects it and sets it up on port 9100. The problem is that it is only printing rather low resolution grayscale. It seems to have something to do with the driver. I have tried several different configurations, one is to use a PCL 4/5 driver. That doesn’t even give me the option of color printing. I have also tried a generic PostScript driver, which does allow me to use a printer based color model or ColorSync, where I have tried both Automatic and a CMYK model (which works great under Linux). It just prints a page with an error:

ERROR: limitcheck
OFFENDING COMMAND: image

I have also CUPS running on a Linux box, which the macbook discovered, I have tried going through that too, to no avail. It may be a path to go, though, if I fail to set it up directly on the mac.

I’ve been looking further into CUPS on the mac (also enabled the Web interface) to see if I could get it working there. I see in /private/etc/cups/ppd/ where I find some PPDs that appears to have been created by the printer setup tool. In there, I find that the printer has been set up with

ColorDevice: False
DefaultColorSpace: Gray

I’ve tried simply changing that to True and RGB. Didn’t work.

There are PPDs for Linux for this printer, so I tried copying that into the above directory in the hope something would pick it up, but that was a bit optimistic.

Funnily, it detects that the printer has color cartridges, but not that it is a color printer.

Any ideas on how I can get color prints for the macs?

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I have been using HP printers for a long time, and I know this frustration. In the distant past, I have been able to get a printer working with a driver that doesn’t officially support the model of printer. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a crap shoot to figure out which drivers will “crossover” and support the printer, but they tend to be close to the same model number.

So, the difficulty is finding model numbers that are similar and that have drivers that works under the newer macOS.

I found a page about Macs and older HP printers, and it had a link to software called HP Easy Admin. I assume this is similar to the web site, but it has a drop-down menu showing all of the drivers — and they seemed to be sort of grouped instead of strictly alphabetical. This often makes it easier to find these compatible models.

The 4700 model isn’t listed, but there is a 5700 (and 6700, etc.). You can download a driver for. the 5700 that supports macOS 12.0. That’s reasonably close too 14, and that’s what I’d start with first.

The actual software is called “Essential Software” and it’s version 5.19.0.1.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_6684934-6684980-16

Give it a try, and with any luck it will work!

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OK, great, thanks a lot! Earlier today, I decided to give CUPS a little more attention, so I did actually manage to get it working through the Linux machine. I had that box discover the printer using lpinfo --include-schemes dnssd -v and the model PPD using lpinfo -m | grep 4700 | grep Color from there it was pretty straightforward since I already have Avahi running.

On the mac, it was still a bit weird, because I needed to configure it with a generic PS driver, but once I had made a printout, it suddenly discovered another printer, which was the one using the hpcups driver that was the right one.

So, I actually have something working now, lets see if I get complaints from my users (who are my wife and daughter :slight_smile: ), if so, I’ll try your route!

Again, thanks a lot, @margaretamartin !

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Setting up printers often seems to involve a little luck, especially in creating that first connection. But the good news is that once they’re up and working, they tend to stay that way.

And if the Mac access fails, you have the Linux machine that might be able to act as a print server in the future.

Thanks for the update!

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